Bachmann ends campaign

Michele Bachmann announced Wednesday morning that she would drop her GOP presidential bid after a sixth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses Tuesday.

“Last night, the people in Iowa spoke with a very clear voice, and so I have decided to step aside,” Bachmann told supporters in West Des Moines.

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She did not endorse one of her rivals, but said instead that Republicans “must rally” around whoever the party chooses as its “standard-bearer” in the race.

“I’ve been blessed to live a wonderful life and am grateful to have been a part of this presidential campaign,” she said.

Her departure will give a boost to Rick Santorum, whose recent surge put him in a virtual tie with Mitt Romney on Tuesday.

Heading into South Carolina, where evangelicals and social conservatives dominate the pool of potential voters, Santorum will be in a better position to consolidate that support. Santorum’s hoping to establish himself as the new — and perhaps final — conservative alternative to Romney, a distinction that he’ll be looking for the South Carolina primary to certify.

Bachmann got just 5 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s caucuses, coming in last of the six candidates who actively contested the state.

Bachmann’s campaign peaked in August, when she took a narrow win in the Ames Straw Poll. But her momentum was immediately stolen by Rick Perry, the Texas governor who launched his own campaign that same day in South Carolina, and quickly began upstaging Bachmann at Iowa events.

Her 6,073 votes Tuesdayare barely more than the 4,823 votes she received in the straw poll in August.

Suddenly in competition for the tea party and Christian conservative base once thought to be capable of propelling her to an Iowa caucus win, Bachmann began a slide in the polls that she couldn’t reverse.

But her campaign was beset by a string of gaffes — starting with the assertion at her campaign launch that Waterloo was the home of John Wayne, when it was actually the hometown of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

Another blow came when Ed Rollins, her campaign manager, departed and began speaking out against Bachmann on cable TV and in the media.

Heading into the fall, Bachmann tried to derail the then-front-runner Perry by attacking him for mandating the HPV vaccine Gardasil. But the blowback of her claims that the vaccine caused mental retardation hurt her as well, even as she continued to repeat them on the campaign trail.